Cold Fish Soup by Adam Farrer

Author:Adam Farrer [Farrer, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913393472
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Towards the end of 2016, when my divorce was being finalised, I needed a place to get my bearings and found myself renting a large, double mezzanine flat on the ground floor of a deconsecrated, portioned-up church. Feeling adrift, I would spend a lot of time alone there, planning my next move and hoping that I’d be able to work out exactly what that would be before I had to commit to another six months on a lease I could barely afford.

Churches are weird places to be on your own, especially when they’re also the site where you stare glumly at formerly shared crockery or cram-eat yum-yums while watching re-runs of Peep Show. But the one I was living in felt the strangest when I was at the dining table, which was positioned exactly where the aisle would have been. I’d sit for breakfast, thinking of all the married couples who had walked arm in arm where I often sat in my underpants, eating Coco Pops and swearing at breakfast radio. And of the hundreds of coffins that would have been carried through that same space. Then there were the mourners. The bodies subsequently buried in what was then my garden. It had once been a building that absorbed the peaks of life’s joy and sadness, the walls and ceiling drenched with prayer, song and the strength of belief. It was tough not to think of that, and fret that I wasn’t living up to the demands of the place. I didn’t believe that the building was haunted so much, but like discovering that you’re standing in a murder house or a place where it’s almost certain that Mozart once squatted over a chamber pot, the historical significance of a space can alter the way you feel about it. Inevitably, living in the church would pique my interest in the idea of an afterlife and, with time on my hands, I soon fell into watching ghost hunting videos on YouTube.

Just like the Yorkshire UFO evidence, these videos are made by enthusiastic amateurs, who wander black-clad through graveyards or abandoned mills, filming their excursions with cameras that are incapable of adequately functioning in low-light conditions. Every scene is grainy and dark, the footage reduced to a shifting wash of grey, low-resolution shapes. As a viewing experience it feels like watching a black and white TV through a dirty window, which is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a ghost to do. Once in a while this gloom is interrupted by one of the investigators turning to look directly into the lens. ‘Did you hear that?’ they whisper fearfully, in response to the sound of their own panicked breathing.

This is a form of pareidolia, the human quirk of finding patterns and forms in things, like faces in pancakes or hidden messages on Judas Priest albums that order you to shoot yourself in the head. In the same way, these ghost hunters hear the sound of a dripping pipe or a rat

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.